PCGamesN
has a follow-up to some comments from id Software's Tim Willits that refute some
of his recollections of the development of QUAKE, id's classic
first-person shooter. After speaking with the id Software design director during
QuakeCon they quoted him saying he designed the shareware version of QUAKE and
originated the idea of producing multiplayer-only maps for the game. This does
not, however, jibe with how other developers on the game recall things.
John Romero's blog
has a detailed response, noting that other games before QUAKE (ROTT in
particular) shipped with multiplayer only maps, and that the DOOM
community (including
me) produced many dedicated MP maps. He also notes that Tim designed four of
the nine maps in the shareware, and bristles at the notion that the game had "no
design direction."
Shacknews contacted John Carmack, saying the former id Technical Director
"could not recall" the meeting where Tim says he sold the multiplayer map
concept to the rest of the team. Finally, American McGee, who designed three of
the shareware maps as well as some of the multiplayer maps in question,
tweeted
about this, saying The Romero's article is "revising revisionist history,"
and calling Tim "a serial credit thief." PCGamesN says their efforts at getting
further comment from Tim or id parent Bethesda Softworks have so far been
unsuccessful.

Kxmode wrote on Aug 31, 2017, 20:29:Is this like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet?

I REGISTERED JUST TO POST BECAUSE I DON'T UNDERSTAND PEOPLE CAN HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR

You go girl.

Beside, created/invented, what's the difference.

For future reference, from Vocabulary.com DictionaryfacetiousIf someone is being facetious they’re being playful with an edge. A knock-knock joke isn’t facetious, but if you call it the most advanced form of comedy, you’re probably being facetious.

Beamer wrote on Sep 1, 2017, 09:02:I disliked it because I was playing Halo on the PC, and the vehicles in that were just infinitely better.

HAHA. All the vehicles except the truck in UT2004 are better than halo's. Halo's only good vehicle is the warthog. To sit and say halo had amazing vehicles outside the warthog is quite the crock of shit. UT2004 had that badass demon vehicle with huge turrets that made the halo tank look like the dinky thing it was.

Not only that there were tonnes of modded servers with different modded vehicles that you obviously never played.

Disagreed. It was better than 2k3, which I thought was actually pretty bad (albeit only playing the demo, which I remember made me laugh a lot how when you scored a goal in the one mode you immediately ragdolled, something new in games), but the vehicles felt terrible to me.

Now here's the really unpopular decision - at the time, I disliked it because I was playing Halo on the PC, and the vehicles in that were just infinitely better.

i'm 10 times more inclined to believe romero. the guy truly loves video games, all video games, and is a dedicated archivist. names, dates, appointments, emails, design docs; source code, art assets, work in progress files. check out the noclip profile on him that visits his home.

i also think his goodwill with the community at large speaks for itself. off the top of my head, when a coder was trying to get daikatana fixed up and shot an email to him asking for help, romero posted a hard drive to him with the source code and other development assets.

Over ten years ago I personally spoke with Willits at a quake con and asked him questions about Quake 1. He did claim that he fought to have the MP maps included. He felt passionate about that decision. That is consistent with his present claim. He also complained about Romero and others, saying he cleaned up their map levels. Well this is my memory so keep that in mind.

To me, Quake doesn't have much story at all HOWEVER it does have a consistent design direction with its imposing Lovecraftian theme. Of course there was design direction but maybe Romero's context references something else (more gameplay elements like an RPG aka System Shock is I think what Romero wanted?).

Immediately after meeting him, my impression of Willits was that he loved making games, and also that he was irrationally tempermental and perhaps a narcissist. That personality type is well known for revising history to glorify themselves. That lends credit to McGee's comment.

Oh, Carmack has a very good memory and I think he is intentionally not entering the fray OR that maybe Tim is attempting to steal credit. Not sure which.

Weird that DOOM 3 is ranked so high in sales. I thought the general opinion of that one was solidly negative because of monster closets and flashlights.

Not surprising at all. Doom 3 has been out for a long time, seen plenty of deep discount sales and still runs on a large variety of system configurations to this day. The software and hardware hasn't really changed all that much in the last 15 years. Most games from the early 2000s will run with minimal effort on modern systems.

The old games, however, mostly require mods to work correctly. They are pre-digital era, some of them were made for 16-bit OS when we didn't even have a frickin' GUI yet.They were also made in an era when progress was crazy fast. While Doom 3 BFG still holds up graphically, some of the older id games began to look old after a mere 12 months due to newer better technologies (3Dfx Glide), MUCH faster CPUs (100% performance increase in 12 months was kinda normal then) etc. etc. etc.

Oh man... so many factors. There is also the fact that computers were MUCH more expensive and really only for nerds at the time of the early id games. The whole (broadband) internet revolution where every household bought a PC to be able to go online had not happened yet. There were only humble dial-up beginnings with AOL, Compuserve et al.In other words, the video games market was so much (much, much, much) smaller than when Doom 3 came out it is not even funny or any contest at all.

As for the quality of Doom 3 I thought it was utter garbage, way too repetitive and way too long for its own good. It could have been fun maybe as a condensed six hour campaign but the repetitive gameplay, repetitive visuals, repetitive level design, repetitive enemies and endless respawns killed any fun very quickly. What a boring game.

With regard to single player all I can say is LOL if anyone ever had any expectations in that regard. Maybe you were too young back then but what one guy in the thread said earlier is 100% true and I also remember that same exact statement from id.

id openly admitted that they did not even write stories or make games to tell stories. They created the levels and the gameplay and only at the very last minute did they put the levels into an order that would resemble a somewhat logical order, write a bit of story text and that was their "campaign".

It was ALWAYS a complete afterthought in the early games. In fact, the whole game was an afterthought early on. What mattered to id back then was licensing their engine to third parties. They made FUCKTONS more money from whoring out their engines than from game sales. There were so many games made with the Q/Q2 engines... Hexen, Heretic, SiN, SoF, Daikatana, Anachronox, X-Men and many more.And let's not even get started on the Q3 engine... Star Trek Voyager games, Star Wars Jedi Knight games, Call of Duty, SoF 2, Wolfenstein ET, MoH AA, Alice etc. etc. were all based on id tech 3.

The whole point of id games up to and including Q3A was more to post a showcase for the engine and then cash in on the licensing fees than to actually create and sell decent games.Personally, I always bought id games for the visual novelty but certainly not because they were good games. It was just fun to check out the leaps in graphical technology back then.

But the games themselves or especially the single player "campaign" (still can't stop LOL'ing at the notion of a "campaign" pre-Quake 4)... big old meh. The first two Dooms were kinda popcorn fun with a friend and a crate of beer when you had no inclination or money to go out on a Saturday night but the real solo single player experiences were always TEH SUCK in id games. That's a scientific fact.